From the time our ancestors dropped from the trees and began walking across the savannah on two legs to the day our great-grandchildren post their first Tweet, our understanding of ethics will have followed a circuitous path from gut to brain.
Our ancestors developed an evolutionary adaptation that enabled them to live relatively peacefully in small, cooperating groups—rudimentary feelings that delighted or disturbed them and that they came to identify with right and wrong, good and bad. Harming another human being—generally wrong. Caring for younger or weaker members of the tribe—generally right. Dividing hunting spoils fairly—good. Freeloaders who do not pull their weight—bad.
Over time, different religions and civilizations elaborated and codified these gut feelings, giving them greater specificity, nuance, and authority. But they retained a striking commonality. The Golden Rule, for example—“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”—shows up in practically every major religion and is the basis for Judeo-Christian ethics.
Historical Development
Nevertheless, a few obstinate souls refused to settle for “the gods ordained it” as justification for ethical precepts. They wanted to understand why it is wrong to lie, cheat, steal, or murder. Like their contemporaries who sought to understand the reasons behind the changing of the seasons and the movements of the stars, they wanted to unveil the organizing principles of ethical beliefs.
Coincidentally, the sixth to second centuries Before the Common Era (BCE) saw a flourishing of ethical thought in east and west. For example, in what is now Nepal and India, a prince-turned-monk named Guatama Buddah, or the Enlightened One (c. 563–483 BCE), taught that a good life followed a “Middle Path” between self-indulgence and self-mortification. In China, an itinerant scholar named Kong Fuzi, “Master Kong,” or as we know him, “Confucius” (551–479 BCE), taught that a good life was built on the practice of virtue, righteousness, and humaneness. And in Athens a small city-state on the Ionian Peninsula, three successive generations of Greek scholars plowed the same philosophical fields over a period of roughly 150 years.
Western Ethical Thought
In exploring the meaning of a good life, Socrates (c. 470–399 BCE), Plato (c. 437–347 BCE), and Aristotle (c. 384–322 BCE) gave us an entire system of thinking about life’s biggest questions. And in the process, they shaped more than two millennia of Western civilization, which will be the primary focus of our ethical exploration.
Born to families of means, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were free to spend time in the agora, or covered market, arguing about the meaning of life. Eventually, they changed the market from a place to sell vegetables, olive oil, and animal hides to a marketplace of ideas—the first lycea, the progenitor of today’s universities. Plato was Socrates’s prize student; Aristotle, his. And all three were dedicated to the love of wisdom, in Greek, φιλοσοφία or “philosophy.”
Not surprisingly, they each spent a lot of time discussing the nature of what is “good.” Socrates, in particular, thought something is “good,” not because the gods say it is, but because it helps make us better and happier people. We no longer needed to seek divine revelation to understand what is good or bad. We could figure it out.
Socrates was not dissing the gods. On the contrary, as interpreted by Plato, he believed God created the world following a perfect blueprint, but he used imperfect material. Thus, the world—and each of us—is flawed, but we have the potential to perfect ourselves according to the original blueprint. Plato believed that is the goal of ethics.
Although Aristotle disagreed with many of Plato’s ideas, he picked up on his ethical inquiry, asking in particular, “What defines a good life?” Almost everything he came up with turned out to be a means to something else. Honor, pleasure, money, or any other good he could imagine was only desirable because it led to something else he called εὐδαιμονία. Eudaemonia was originally translated as “happiness,” but is now considered to mean our flourishing as human beings.
Only human flourishing, or eudaemonia, is an end in itself and not a means of attaining some other good. To Aristotle, it was the ultimate purpose of life, the goal by which a life should be measured. Of course, that led to another question—how could we achieve true happiness, the kind that isn’t just a way station to something else? Aristotle concluded it required a lifelong habit of making the right choices, and he called those good habits “virtues.”
Virtue and Purpose
The link between virtues and purpose is a key element of Aristotle’s ethical theory. In fact, in Greek, Aristotle’s very name derived from αριστος (aristos), meaning “best” and τελος (telos) meaning “purpose.” As Aristotle understood them, virtues were not simply moral states, as in being honest or generous. They were qualities of all sorts that help their possessor fulfill his, her, or its potential. So in an Aristotelian sense, height is a virtue in a basketball player; speed, in a horse; sharpness, in a knife. Think of virtue as a synonym for “excellence in attaining purpose.” For Aristotle, virtue was always the “Golden Mean” between extremes. Courage, for example, is the happy medium between the contrary dispositions of rashness and cowardice. Friendliness lies between obsequiousness and petulance; modesty, between diffidence and boastfulness.
Aristotle considered the ability to reason the highest virtue for a human being because it is unique to our species. But he knew human beings were more than reasoning machines. He was way ahead of his time in his understanding of human psychology and actually wrote the first treatise on the subject, entitled Para Psyche, Greek for “about the mind or soul.” He was the first to identify the struggle between the human id and ego: “There are two powers in the soul which appear to be moving forces—desire and reason…. But desire prompts actions in violation of reason” (Aristotle, tr. Hammond, 1901, p.132).
So he understood that acting ethically would not always be easy. He realized that reason and baser appetites usually pull in opposite directions. But social order depends on self-control and delayed gratification. He also understood that people could not simply will themselves to be virtuous; it required practice. Virtues are like good habits; vices, bad habits. We have dispositions toward both, but repeatedly performing one or the other and really working at it will make them part of our character. In fact, biologist E. O. Wilson (1999, p.269) considers “character” the internalization of virtues into “an integrated self … strong enough to endure through trials of solitude and adversity.”
Character
Character may seem like an old-fashioned quality when celebrities build careers on the distribution of sex tapes, corporate executives make soft landings in golden parachutes after steering their companies into the ground, and investors cannot seem to see beyond a quarter’s earnings. But recent research (Strohminger & Nichols, 2014) suggests moral character plays an even more important role in how others see us than previously suspected. “Our identity comes more from our moral character than from our memory or intellect” notes psychology professor Nancy Gopnik. “Our moral character, after all, is what links us to other people. It’s the part of us that goes beyond our own tangle of neurons to touch the brains and lives of others.”1 And proving to be of poor moral character has serious consequences. Consider the example of just one hapless CEO who was caught kicking his dog on an elevator surveillance video.2 More than 180,000 people signed a petition to have him fired. Even his abject apology, a $100,000 donation to fight animal cruelty, and a promise to do 1,000 hours of community service with at an animal shelter could not save him. After 10 days of unrelenting criticism, his Board was forced to let him go.
The price of a character failing has been quantified in even starker terms. According to one academic study, companies with CEOs accused of personal misdeeds—ranging from drunken driving to domestic disputes—experience an immediate loss of 4.1 percent in shareholder value and a long-run decline of 11 to 14 percent (Cline et al., 2015).
Good character is not only the hallmark of an ethical life, it is expected by hard-nosed investors. But what really drives the Aristotelian concept of ethics is purpose—the goal to which virtues are directed. It comes up in the very first sentence of Aristotle’s book on the subject (Aristotle, tr. Ross, 1999, p.3).
Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.
Contemporary Aristotelianism
Aristotle believed everything exists for a purpose. Whether something is good or bad, virtue or vice, depends on whether or not it serves the purpose to which it is directed. And, of course, he believed all virtues should support life’s ultimate purpose—human flourishing.
One of the foremost contemporary interpreters of Aristotelian ethics, Alasdair Macintyre (1998, p. 187), points out that Aristotle defined virtue within the social roles of his time. “To excel is to excel at war or in games as Achilles does, in sustaining a household as Penelope does, in giving counsel to the assembly as Nestor does, in the telling of a tale as Homer himself does,” he explained. Macintyre applied this concept to modern life. “The exercise of a virtue exhibits qualities which are required for sustaining a social role and for exhibiting excellence in some well-marked area of social practice,” he wrote.
To Macintyre, virtue is expressed in two kinds of activity. First are those that sustain the human community, which is how we usually think of virtue. But then he adds a second category of action—excellence in “some well-marked area of social practice.” By “social practice” Macintyre does not mean activity along the lines of social work or community activism, but the ordinary occupations common to modern life. “Social practices,” for Macintyre, are any complex activities that take place within a social setting and have their own internal standards of excellence. In fact, to Macintyre’s way of thinking, the occupations and professions of everyday life are the primary settings within which virtue and character are expressed today. This interpretation of Aristotle puts such practices as public relations—or accounting or farming—at the center of virtue ethics. So uncovering the ethical principles of public relations requires us to examine its very purpose.
The Early Practice of Public Relations
This book is not the place to get into a detailed history of public relations. But a quick survey of the practice’s major phases over the last century or so reveals the multiple purposes it has embraced. Sadly, it may also shed some light on why so many people think public relations practitioners are unprincipled, obfuscating spin doctors.
Modern public relations started off innocently enough in the 19th century, following the U.S. Civil War, when the railroads made it practical to move products to market from far-flung factories and the telegraph allowed newspapers to report news happening outside their immediate area of circulation. Few saw it at the time, but those developments gave birth to a rapacious consumer market. People no longer had to deal with local artisans; they could purchase products from corporations that used the burgeoning media of the time to create homey personalities, renown, and demand for what were now their “brands.”
Notable Influences on Public Relations Ethics
Phineas T. Barnum
This first wave of public relations was all about promotion, getting attention for a product, a company, or an idea. An entrepreneurial showman named Phineas T. Barnum gave the era its motto—“There’s no such thing as bad publicity, as long as they spelled your name right.” Though there is no evidence he ever actually said those words, his whole life was a testament to his belief in the precept.
P. T. Barnum (1810–1891) was only the second millionaire in the United States. And just 5 days before his death he wrote what could have been his epitaph: “I am indebted to the press of the United States for almost every dollar which I possess” (Brunn, 2001, p. 25). Indeed, reporters of the time were indebted to Barnum because he gave them such great copy, and public relations scholars Scott Cutlip, Allen Center, and Glen Broom (1985) anointed him “master of the press agents.” For example, to drum up attention for his Broadway museum, Barnum had an elephant plow his property along the commuter tracks into New York City. That plowing pachyderm tilled the same field at least 60 times before Barnum decided the stunt had generated enough ink.
Barnum engaged in what became known as “ballyhoo,” puffery that is so ridiculously outlandish—everything was “colossal” and “stupendous”—that everyone is in on the joke. Barnum himself called it “humbug,” which he defined as “putting on glittering appearances … by which to suddenly arrest public attention, and attract the public eye and ear” (Barnum, 1866, p. 21). For example, he planted letters in the New York media, reporting that an actual mermaid had passed through outlying towns on its way to Barnum’s museum. Thousands of New Yorkers lined up to see her (or it) only to find something that looked a lot like the tail of a fish attached to the torso of a monkey. No matter. Barnum never claimed it was real; he presented it as the “Feejee Mermaid,” a creature that medical science had not yet been able to explain.
“Happy hoaxes” like these entertained the masses and, more importantly, drew them into his dime museum. So did other attractions, like Major, the Amazing Talking Pony, that used its hoofs to answer questions like, “What’s two and two.” When his acts were real, he found a way to make them even more newsworthy. To generate publicity for the Bearded Lady, he arranged to be sued. To make a distant relative who was only 25 inches tall into a sideshow worthy act, he renamed him Tom Thumb and promoted him to General, complete with uniform and medals.3
P. T. Barnum’s press agentry techniques soon moved from show business to industry. The turn of the 20th century was a period of public dissatisfaction with “Big Business.” A relatively small number of corporate titans operated in great secrecy, yet controlled the country’s natural resources and largest industries, exerted great influence over government officials, paid extremely low wages, created monopolies to squash competition, and further enriched themselves by manipulating the stock market. It was a time of trust-breaking, muckraking, and social unrest. Many businesses felt an acute need to justify themselves to the masses.
Perhaps the neediest of them was a young company called AT&T. It was, born in 1876, at the height of robber baron era, but by 1903 found itself without patent protection and with hordes of new competitors, not to mention unrelentingly bad media coverage thanks to its poor service. AT&T’s president at the time, Frederick Fish, had been a skilled patent attorney, but he had no idea what to do about the company’s plight. So he was receptive when a publicity agent named George Michaelis suggested “the situation could not be made worse by a venture in publicity and it might be made better” (Ellsworth, 1936, p. 58). Fish hired Michaelis’ company on the spot. That firm—the Publicity Bureau of Boston—was the first public relations agency in the country and only three years old at the time.
Michaelis turned the AT&T assignment over to James Drummond Ellsworth (1863–1940), a reporter who had bounced around newspapers from Denver to Boston until an opera singer paid him $50 for placing a story about her in the Boston Herald. Ellsworth suddenly realized he could make more money promoting the likes of her than chasing police cars and ambulances for stories. So he joined the Publicity Bureau and traveled the country, convincing editors to run favorable stories about AT&T and to ignore its competitors.
Ellsworth eventually left the Publicity Bureau and became a full-time employee of AT&T itself. He continued his peregrinations, traveling as much as 30 to 40,000 miles a year, impressive mileage considering it all had to be done by rail and horseback. He continued to pioneer new tactics to counter negative media coverage, some of which seem questionable today. He shadowed the company’s critics on their speaking tours, circulating negative information about them. He even tried to interfere with competitors’ efforts to obtain financing. In Rochester, he spent about $4,000 on ads touting AT&T’s policies and service investments, discovering in the process how easily he could leverage advertising buys into favorable (and “free”) news coverage. And, to influence local editors and reporters even more directly, he sponsored a contest among them for writing the best ad copy. Few of the entries were useable, but every entry received an award of some kind.
Ellsworth was by no means alone in adopting such tactics, which passed for “street smart” in the first half of the 20th century. But publicity came to mean more than placing stories in the media; it edged ever more deeply into the newsgathering process itself.
Ivy Lee
At around the same time, a number of public relations people were taking a more expansive view of the practice. Foremost among these was Ivy Ledbetter Lee (1877–1934). Like Ellsworth, Lee was a former reporter, but while publicists focused on spreading good news, Lee believed companies should explain themselves to the public in bad times as well as good. He believed information would increase public knowledge and, in the long run, that would be in a company’s self-interest.
Lee had the opportunity to put that principle into practice in October 1906, when a Pennsylvania Railroad train jumped a trestle at Atlantic City, New Jersey, and plunged into a creek killing 50 passengers. The standard practice at the time was to clam up and cover up. But Lee convinced the railroad to issue a press release before rumors spread. He even invited reporters and photographers to the scene, providing a special train to get them there. Journalists and public officials praised the railroad for its openness and concern for passengers.
Lee was not always so lucky. Earlier that same year, he represented coal mine owners in eastern Pennsylvania during a bitter strike. When he sent the local newspapers daily “handouts” with pertinent facts about the strike, the editors objected. They called these new “press releases” essentially “ads” and accused Lee of trying to manipulate them. That prompted Lee to issue his “Declaration of Principles” which read in full (Morse, 1906, p. 460):
This is not a secret press bureau. All our work is done in the open. We aim to supply news. This is not an advertising agency; if you think any of our matter ought properly to go to your business office, do not use it.
Our matter is accurate. Further details on any subject treated will be supplied promptly, and any editor will be assisted most cheerfully in verifying directly any statement of fact. Upon inquiry, full information will be given to any editor concerning those on whose behalf an article is sent out.
In brief, our plan is, frankly and openly, on behalf of business concerns and public institutions, to supply to the press and public of the United States prompt and accurate information concerning subjects which it is of value and interest to the public to know about.
Corporations and public institutions give out much information in which the news point is lost to view. Nevertheless, it is quite as important to the public to have this news as it is to the establishments themselves to give it currency.
I send out only matter every detail of which I am willing to assist any editor in verifying for himself. I am always at your service for the purpose of enabling you to obtain more complete information concerning any of the subjects brought forward in my copy.
As high-minded as this declaration might have been, Lee was caught more than once apparently violating it. The most notorious example occurred in 1914 when Lee was again representing coal mine operators, this time in Colorado where a gun battle between strikersand state militia left a number of miners dead. Upton Sinclair dubbed Lee “Poison Ivy,” because one of his handouts claimed the strikers’ deaths resulted from an overturned stove rather than militia bullets. Lee’s claim was not an outright lie—in fact, while three miners and one militiaman were killed in the initial gun battle, 11 women and children were found dead in one of the many earthen storage pits dug below the striker’s tent colony outside the mine. According to an exhaustive historical study of the incident, “The innocent victims had hidden in the pit to escape the gunfire and apparently suffocated when a smoky fire later swept through the compound” (Hallahan, 2002). It is conceivable that Lee was referring the source of that fire.
But he did himself no favors when he told a 1915 Congressional Commission investigating the coal mine strike: “By the truth, Mr. Chairman, I mean the truth about the operators’ case. What I was to do was to advise and get their case into proper shape for them.” When asked, “What personal effort did you ever make to ascertain that the facts given to you by the operators were correct?”, Lee responded: “None whatever” (Ewen, 1996, pp. 80–81). The following year, Lee offered a group of railroad executives a startlingly flexible definition of “facts” (pp. 104–105):
What is a fact? The effort to state an absolute fact is simply an attempt to … give you my interpretation of the facts.
To Lee, that was the heart of the matter. For information to be of any practical use, it has to be interpreted to a public that is basically preoccupied with other things. “The public is interested in their own affairs,” he told his clients. “They are not very much interested in your affairs” (Ewen, 1996, pp. 47–48). Still, the study mentioned earlier maintains there is “no support for claims that Lee was intentionally deceptive” despite an obvious gap between his espoused principles and his actions. “This contradiction can be explained,” Hallahan (2002, p. 1) notes, “by the fact that Lee worked in less than ideal circumstances.” Now, there’s a loophole that Aristotle may not have recognized.
For all his faults, Lee (1925) had a practical, self-interested view of public relations. He cautioned that publicity was less a smokescreen than an antiseptic.
Publicity must not be thought of … as a sort of umbrella to protect you against the rain of an unpleasant public opinion. Publicity must not be regarded as a bandage to cover up a sore and enable you to get along pretty well with the trouble still there. Publicity must, if your trouble is to be cured, be considered rather as an antiseptic, which shall cleanse the very source of the trouble and reveal it to the doctor, which is the public. (p. 44)
To Lee’s mind, William Vanderbilt was seriously delusional when he responded to a reporter’s question about train schedules by declaring, “the public be damned.”4 In 1916, Lee warned a group of railroad executives that “You suddenly find you are not running a private business, but running a business of which the public itself is taking complete supervision. The crowd is in the saddle, the people are on the job, and we must take consideration of that fact, whether we like it or not” (Ewen, 1996, pp.74–75).
Edward L. Bernays
The “crowd” was precisely the target of another public relations pioneer who hung out his shingle about this time. Edward Bernays (1891–1995) was a nephew of Sigmund Freud and greatly influenced by new discoveries in cognitive science, especially those that revealed the power of unconscious thoughts and desires. For example, in his book Propaganda, Bernays (1928, p. 52) revealed:
Psychologists of the school of Freud have pointed out that many of man’s thoughts and actions are compensatory substitutes for desires which he has been obliged to suppress. A thing may be desired not for its intrinsic worth or usefulness, but because he has unconsciously come to see in it a symbol of something else, the desire for which he is ashamed to admit to himself. A man buying a car may think he wants it for purposes of locomotion. He may really want it because it is a symbol of social position, an evidence of his success in business, or a means of pleasing his wife.
Bernays not only believed this theory, he applied it avidly not only to big-ticket products like automobiles, but also to such quotidian items as cigarettes. Bernays was also greatly influenced by the French social scientist and anthropologist, Gustave le Bon (1895), who wrote a widely read book on the psychology of crowds. Le Bon believed the anonymity of crowds caused people to lose their sense of personal responsibility, unquestioningly following the crowd’s predominant ideas and emotions, limited only by the morality and thinking of its least capable members. Indeed, le Bon compared being in a crowd for a great length of time to being under the influence of a hypnotist.5
Like many progressive thinkers of the time, Bernays believed the educated elite had an obligation to lead the uneducated masses, guided by what was best for the public good. To him, this was an essential element of democracy (1928, pp. 9–10). And he was unapologetic about it. Indeed, he thought the elite would police themselves, once warning, “The public relations counsel has a professional responsibility to push only those ideas he can respect, and not to promote causes or accept assignments for clients he considers antisocial” (Bernays, 1947, p. 113).
Although widely considered a Master Press Agent, in Bernays’s hands, public relations was less about breathless publicity or self-serving information than about manipulating social and psychological forces to get the public (aka “the crowd”) to do what he wanted. “The functions of the public relations counsel are those of a directive influence rather than a press agent,” he said in one interview. “The public relations counsel in this conception does not report events to the public press, he molds them in such form that the press will of its own accord give wide and favorable publicity to the client.”6 Bernays issued news releases like his contemporary Ivy Lee, but they were less likely to describe his client’s virtues and products than to promote an event that seemed only tangentially related, drawing on third party endorsements whenever possible.
Bernays’s very first public relations campaign, undertaken when he was just 21 and editing a medical journal for a friend’s father, is a good illustration of his technique. A reader submitted a glowing review of “Damaged Goods,” a French play that had yet to be staged in the United States. The play dealt with sexually transmitted diseases—an issue that was considered unfit for public discussion at the time. Bernays decided to publish the review, prompting the producers of the play to hire him as a consultant. They were concerned that prudish authorities would shut the show down, which had happened to a play about prostitution by George Bernard Shaw only years before. But Bernays saw an opportunity to turn potential controversy into a cause.
He used his position as editor of the Medical Review of Reviews to form the “Sociological Fund Committee” and asked some of the most prominent public figures of the time to join it, endorsing the effort to stamp out sexually transmitted diseases. Those who signed up included John D. Rockefeller Jr., Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt Sr., Mr. and Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Reverend John Haynes Holmes of New York’s Unitarian Community Church.
Endorsements and checks poured in, helping to fund a Broadway run, as well as a special performance in Washington for justices of the Supreme Court, the President’s cabinet, and members of Congress. Reviews were not kind. One paper called it “dull and almost unendurable” (Axelrod, 2008, p. 91), but a newspaper editorial credited the play with “striking sex-o’clock” in America (Bernays, 1965, p. 60).
Bernays used the same techniques in a public relations career that literally spanned the century (he died in 1995 at the age of 103). In the intervening years, he promoted everything from water fluoridation (for Alcoa) and the dangers of drinking from a common cup (for Dixie Cups) to Ivory soap (for P&G). He even helped prevent the Guatemalan government from confiscating United Fruit’s lands through a campaign in the United States to portray its president as a “Communist.” Public pressure became so great that President Eisenhower had little choice but to come to the fruit company’s rescue.7
In all this, Bernays’s strategy of indirection seldom wavered. When surveys showed women were not buying Lucky Strike cigarettes because the green package with a red bulls eye clashed with their clothes, Bernays staged a charity ball at which wearing a green gown was required and convinced the fashion industry to declare green the color of the new season.8 For the Beechnut Packing Company, he got people to eat ham and eggs in the morning, based on a survey of doctors he commissioned to document the health benefits of a “hearty breakfast” (Colleary, 2012, July 19).9 For General Electric, which controlled much of the country’s electrical manufacturing at the time, Bernays mounted “Light’s Golden Jubilee,” a worldwide celebration of the light bulb on the 50th anniversary of its invention, October 21, 1929.
Leading up to the actual date, Bernays arranged for the Post Office to issue a commemorative stamp, for George M. Cohan to write a special song (Thomas Edison—Miracle Man), and for stories to appear in magazines ranging from the Saturday Evening Post to Scientific American. Governors and Mayors issued proclamations; museums mounted special exhibits; and schools ran essay contests. Then, on the day itself, the elderly inventor switched on a replica of the first light bulb under the watchful eyes of the president of the United States and various captains of industry gathered for the occasion (Ewen, 1996, pp. 116–118). It was all ostensibly the celebration of a great inventor; in reality, it was the celebration and near-canonization of a gigantic company. Under Bernays, public relations became an instrument of hidden persuasion or, as he termed it, the “engineering of consent.”
A masterful self-promoter, Bernays did some of his best engineering on his own image. He wrote nine books on his techniques and even taught one of the first courses on public relations at New York University in 1923. Indeed, he was so successful in establishing himself as one of the field’s founding fathers, helped by the fact that he outlived all his contemporaries, the very practice of public relations became identified in the public mind with his techniques of shadowy behind-the-scenes manipulation.
Around the time Bernays was in his heyday, another lesser-known public relations practitioner entered the scene. He had a single client for much of his career and wrote far fewer books, one to Bernays’s nine.10 Yet he arguably had more lasting influence. It all came about because the CEO of AT&T wanted someone to write a book about the company.
Arthur W. Page
By the end of 1926, Arthur W. Page (1883–1960) had just about reached the end of his rope in his family’s publishing business. His father was Walter Hines Page, former editor of the Atlantic Monthly and World’s Work magazines, and partner in the publishing house of Doubleday, Page, and Company. Young Page had joined the staff of World’s Work immediately after graduating from Harvard, eventually becoming editor. But a continuing series of disagreements with the Doubleday family over the magazine’s direction had convinced him to quit.11 Coincidentally, as soon as he made up his mind to leave Doubleday, an old college classmate and friend, Walter Gifford, asked if Page could drop by his office and “talk to him for a minute” (Page, 1956, pp. 70–72).
Gifford had risen through the ranks of AT&T to become CEO only 2 years earlier. The ostensible reason for his invitation was because “somebody’d suggested a book about the telephone,” and he wanted to know what Page thought of the idea. “Well, it may satisfy the vanity of the folks in the company … but such things don’t have much effect upon the public,” Page said. “It won’t do you any harm, if you want to have it. It won’t do you any good either.” Then as Page started to leave, Gifford startled him by asking, “Are you wedded to the publishing business?”
It seems that James Ellsworth was still running public relations for AT&T, but was ready to retire. Gifford needed a replacement and offered Page the job on the spot. “What would you think about coming into the telephone business?” he asked. As Page later recalled,
What was in his mind was that I’d been writing editorials about what was the duty of big business in a democracy and how should they get along, and giving them a lot of free advice.… What he asked me to do was to come to AT&T and see what I could do. So I told them that if they were serious about it—that is, I didn’t want to go there as a publicity man—but if they were serious about taking that point of view as the general policy, nothing would please me more than to try to do something instead of telling everyone else to do it (Page, 1956, pp. 70–72).
Gifford agreed and made Page an officer of the company, perhaps the first public relations officer at any corporation, reflecting their common view of public relations. In an article Gifford wrote for the World’s Work just the previous June, (1926, pp. 166–168) he contended “the old robber barons” of industry were being replaced by a new breed of business people “who realize more accurately what the limits of their powers are, and have a much keener sense of their responsibilities to the public.” In fact, he continued, “Corporations owe their success and even their existence to the good will of the public; and where their views seem to clash, the corporation must either persuade the public to its view, or alter its own.” He wanted Page to lead that effort. According to John Brooks (1976, p. 173), who wrote a masterful book about AT&T’s first 100 years, it turned out to be “one of Gifford’s most brilliant early staff appointments.” Brooks saw Page’s appointment as a “brilliantly successful effort” to return the company’s public relations to “the broad standard, emphasizing candid disclosure, rather than parochial propaganda” that had characterized Ellsworth’s rough-and-ready tenure.
Page’s first assignment was a speech Gifford would give in October 1927 at a combined meeting of the Interstate Commerce Commission and the State Utilities Commissioners in Dallas, Texas, which regulated the company. In the speech, Page had Gifford highlight what they both saw as AT&T’s special responsibility: “The fact that the responsibility for such a large part of the entire telephone service of the country rests solely upon this Company and its Associated Companies also imposes on the management an unusual obligation to the public.”12
With a few more years in corporate America under his belt, Page came to believe that obligation was not limited to the likes of AT&T. In a speech to railroad public relations people in 1939, he declared: “All business begins with the public permission and exists by public approval.”13 To his own troops, he was even blunter: “If we think at times the public jury does not give us a fair chance to tell our story, that doesn’t make any difference,” he told them. “In the long run I am not afraid of that, but if in the long run it were true that the public wouldn’t give us a fair hearing, it would merely mean we would have to find a way to please the public without a fair hearing. We have got to please this public for it’s the only public we’ve got—we can’t change it.”14
In the 20 years Page led AT&T public relations, he focused his department less on the task of “selling the company” and more on the “intangible and more important job” of bringing to the company the needs and desires of its customers and the general public.15 He considered public relations a general management function and, as he promised Gifford, he concerned himself primarily with matters of policy—not simply with what the company said, but more critically with what the company did. By 1941, Page was one of only three operating vice presidents sitting on the company’s Board of Directors. And ironically, Page eventually did write that “book about the telephone.” Titled The Bell Telephone System (1941), it appeared the same year he joined the company’s Board of Directors.
Such were the early days of public relations practice in the 20th century—a struggle to define the function, as the corporations it served tried to deal with an increasingly skeptical public and government. What would Aristotle have thought of all this?
The practice of public relations would have been familiar to Aristotle, though he would not have known it by that name. As practiced for much of the 20th century, public relations would have looked like rhetoric to him, the art of persuasive speaking and writing. That was something Aristotle knew well. He even developed a system of rhetoric, suggesting its effectiveness depended on three elements—a speaker’s credibility, ability to connect with an audience emotionally, and use of compelling logic. And he measured the character of the practice by its purpose—not solely its immediate goal of persuasion, but its ultimate purpose of contributing to its audience’s happiness or flourishing.
In the next chapter, we will consider how public relations—as practiced by the likes of Barnum, Ellsworth, Lee, and Bernays—served that lofty purpose. We will take a deep dive into one of the most basic virtues of public relations—truthfulness. And we’ll examine other virtues that have particular application to the practice.
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1 Gopnik, N. (2015, September 12). Is Our Identity in Memory, Intellect, or Moral Character? Wall Street Journal. http://www.wsj.com/articles/is-our-identity-in-intellect-memory-or-moral-character-1441812784.
2 Horovitz, B. (2014, September 2). “Dog-kicking CEO out after petition,” USA Today. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/09/02/centerplate-changeorg-petition-social-media-animal-abuse/14967819/. Accessed July 22, 2015.
3 Barnum cheerfully and unapologetically recounted these and other examples of humbug in his autobiography. See: Barnum, P. T. (1855). The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself, Reprint ed. (2000), Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
4 Watson, E.S. (1936, November 6). The truth about that “public be damned interview.” Lake Benton Valley News. http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1018&dat=19361106&id=DbckAAAAIBAJ&sjid=zA8GAAAAIBAJ&pg=1501,734632. Accessed July 22, 2015.
5 Bernays was also influenced by Wilfred Trotter (1916) who promoted ideas similar to le Bon’s in his book Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (London: T. F. Unwin). Trotter eventually became Freud’s personal physician.
6 From a June 26, 1928, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company publicity piece summarizing interviews with “the two most prominently mentioned public relations counsels in New York,” Ivy Lee, represented by T.J. Ross, Jr., manager of the New York headquarters, and Edward L. Bernays. See the Bernays papers in the Library of Congress: http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/cool:@field(DOCID+@lit(me191)).
7 Tye, L. (2006, Fall). Watch out for the top banana. The Cabinet. http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/23/tye.php. Accessed July 22, 2015.
8 Described by Bernays in an interview for the Museum of PR web site: http://www.prmuseum.com/bernays/bernays_1934.html
9 Colleary, E, “How ‘Bacon and Eggs’ Became the American Breakfast,” The American Table web site, July 19, 2012. See: http://www.americantable.org/2012/07/how-bacon-and-eggs-became-the-american-breakfast/
10 Bernays wrote nine books, including Crystalizing Public Opinion (1923), Propaganda (1928), Speak up for Democracy (1940), Morale: First Line of Defense (1941), Public Relations (1945), Your Future in Public Relations (1961), Biography of an Idea (1965), Your Future in a Public Relations Career (1979), and The Later Years: Public Relations Insights (1986). Despite being a prolific writer of speeches for other people and a scion of the Doubleday–Page publishing firm, Page wrote a single book which only touched on public relations: The Bell Telephone System appeared under his authorship in 1941.
11 Page (1956, pp. 70–72) never spelled out the nature of his disagreement with the Doubleday family, though in an oral history recorded by Columbia University he said Doubleday “wanted to leave out the more serious side of the magazine” and “move into more picture magazines and entertainment.”
12 Gifford, W.S. (1927, October). Speech delivered to the National Association of Railroad and Utilities Commissioners, Dallas, Texas. http://comm.psu.edu/page-center/resources/other-resources/page-written
13 Page, A.W. (1939, October 27). Industrial Statesmanship. Speech delivered to the Public Relations Conference of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway Company, White Sulphur Springs, VA. http://comm.psu.edu/page-center/resources/other-resources/page-speeches. Accessed on July 22, 2015.
14 Page, A.W. (1936, December 10). Public Relations Today and the Outlook for the Future. Speech delivered a public relations conference of the New York Telephone Company. http://comm.psu.edu/page-center/resources/other-resources/page-speeches. Accessed July 22, 2015.
15 Speech delivered by Arthur W. Page to the Bell Telephone System’s General Operating Conference, May 1927.